By and large, I think it's fairest to say "I didn't mind" the books we read in school. 

A few stood out as instant favorites: Shakespeare's Macbeth which, together with Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet movie (which we watched in class) laid the groundwork for my lifelong love of Shakespeare; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese (which the rest of my class hated, but I instantly loved).

Some that I found OK without being enthusiastic about them still inspired me to take a closer look at their authors and discover works that I ended up liking much better -- e.g. Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers and Intrigue and Love (aka Passion and Politics), which eventually led me to his Don Carlos, which in turn became an instant favorite.

Some I rather disliked in school (at least in part, because of the way in which they were presented in class), but I reread them years later and they suddenly made a whole lot more sense -- such as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Albert Camus's The Stranger (though I still liked The Plague, which we never read in school, better), Max Frisch's Homo Faber and The Firebugs; and, perhaps most surprisingly, Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician (surprising because Mann was already a favorite author of mine at the time, so this should have been a no-brainer favorite from the start).

There were only a few books that I positively hated in school, but those I hated with enough of a vengeance never to have looked at them again -- or at anything else written by their authors: Peter Handke's Kaspar and Alfred Andersch's Sansibar.

Far and away the biggest impact on my reading preferences, though, was wielded by my final English teacher, who not only taught that Shakespeare class mentioned above and introduced me to sonnets (EBB, Shakespeare and otherwise), but who also gave me a copy of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park as a gift ... and thus inspired yet another one of my most lasting instances of book fandom -- because come on, if you fall in love with Austen's writing when reading Mansfield Park, everything else is just bound to fall into place completely naturally.

(Task: Did you love or hate the books you had to read for school?  Looking back, which ones (good or bad) stand out to you the most?)

"Here's harmony!" said she; "here's repose! Here's what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe! Here's what may tranquilize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene."

In “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen



Many eons ago I was reading Austen's "Mansfield Park" in high school when the leader of a group of teenagers commented on the "puff with the specs reading girlie books." I paid him no mind at that particular moment. I waited till I could catch him alone in the playground without his bunch of cronies around him. I asked him then if he'd care to repeat what he'd said before. He said he didn't. 

The old adage you can't judge a book by its cover surely applies to the title as well. What's next? Nick Hornby's "About a Boy" should only appeal to paedophiles? "Animal Farm" to sheep-shaggers (or more accurately pig-shaggers). Such immature, hating comments belong in the 1970s.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

... during the last 8 years of her life, during which she wrote all of her major novels (and saw four of them published during her lifetime: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma).

The dining room, with Jane's writing table tucked away in a corner next to the window.

Jane's bedroom (also the room where most of her family said goodbye to her before she died).

A replica of the blue dress and bonnet that Jane is wearing in the portrait sketched of her by her sister Cassandra.

A quilt handmade by Jane, her sister Cassandra and their mother, and a muslin shawl embroidered by Jane.

And last but not least ...

The museum's resident cat! :D

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